Текст книги "Spin Control"

Автор книги: Крис Мориарти

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

“What isit?”

“It seemed better not to ask.” Arkasha extracted two smaller beakers from the autoclave, poured out double shots of the clear liquid with practiced ease, and handed one to Arkady. “Tastes like beetle dung, but it gets the job done.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea, Arkasha.”

“Drink faster, then. You’ll be amazed at how quickly your doubts slip away.”

Arkady took a sip and found, to his relief, that it tasted more or less like vodka. “I’m not going to go blind from this, am I?”

“Not unless you play with yourself while you’re drinking it.”

Arkady choked and spit a mouthful of the stuff on the floor and sat wheezing on his lab stool while Arkasha thumped at his back.

When Arkady was more or less breathing again, Arkasha climbed onto the counter, crossed his arms and legs, and peered down at him, looking for all the world like one of the sleek sharp-eyed crows that infested Gilead’s farmland districts. “So,” he began as if he were embarking on the weightiest of philosophical debates. “Tell me why, out of all the things in the world you could have turned your brain to, you chose ants.”

Whyants? Where to begin?

Even the mere names were things of beauty to him. Pogonomyrmex barbatus,for example: the red harvester ant, whose name always brought to his mind the earliest known description of the species, from some ancient Aztec codex: “It sweeps, makes itself heaps of sand, makes wide roads, makes a home.” Or the beautiful dacetines; or the primitive, solitary ponerines; or all the varied species of industrious leaf cutters.

The names and lore of ants reminded Arkady of the coded flicker of navigational beacons. They traced a tenuous path through the galaxy—always at the edge of extinction, always running just ahead of the death from which there could be no returning—plotting the tenuous evolutionary trail that linked all of posthumanity, UN and Syndicate alike, to Earth.

Take the ants on Novalis, for example. From a meager, hopelessly narrow stream of imported specimens they had flowed across the planet, filling every ecological niche he had so far investigated. Harvesters, earth movers, foragers, swarm raiders…and several variants of ants that Arkady had encountered in none of his long studies and that he suspected might be entirely new species adapted to the peculiar needs of life on Novalis.

“And what about you?” he asked Arkasha, embarrassed that he’d gone on so long. “Why genetics?”

“That’s less interesting. I was always top of my class, and all the top students are pushed into genetics more or less automatically.”

Arkady must have looked as incredulous about the idea of Arkasha being pushed into anything as he felt.

“And I liked it for my own reasons too, I suppose.”

Arkady waited.

“There’s a kind of poetry to genetics,” Arkasha said at last. He looked defensive, as if he thought Arkady might laugh at the idea. “I mean look at a person. Any person. You. The Aurelias. Look at this whole amazing planet we’re sitting on. And then just imagine what Earthmust have been with all her countless species coevolving on an evolutionary landscape that they themselves were changing at every moment. Have you read Lotka? Not the parts they quote in political philosophy. The science. At the end of Principles of Mathematical Biology,he writes about the evolutionof planets, what he calls the great world engine. I wanted to find out what makes the world engine run.”

“And have you?”

“I bare my soul to you and all you can do is make fun of me?”

“I’m not making fun of you! Really, I mean it. Have you found out?”

“No. But I will.” He gestured toward the door, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “The answer’s right outside the airlock. All the answers. We just have to find eyes new enough to see Novalis with.”

“I know!” Arkady cried. “I feel the same way! I was thinking just this morning that Novalis is a kind of second chance. And not just for the Syndicates either. For earth sciences generally. Every time we’ve ever looked at data from pre-Evacuation Earth and wished we could go back, knowing what we know now, with the tools we have now… There’s a lifetime of work here. More than a lifetime.”

Arkasha poured himself another glass, threw back a quick swallow, then topped off Arkady’s glass. “So are you going to stick around to do it?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that.”

“You mean stay here? Permanently?”

“Someone’ll have to.”

“But don’t you want to go home to Rostov?”

Arkasha shrugged.

“It’s home. Doesn’t that matter to you?”

Another shrug.

“But…weren’t you happy there?”

“No,” Arkasha said baldly.

“Why not?”

“Has it ever occurred to you, Arkady, that we might be getting a little too conformist in the Syndicates? We go to great lengths to maintain sufficient genetic diversity, of course. But what about diversity here?” He tapped his forehead. “Or here.” He tapped his chest, not quite in the anatomically correct position, but close enough so that they both knew what organ he was talking about.

“I don’t think—”

“Look at you, for example. Look at the misery you caught over your dissent paper.”

“That’s putting it strongly.”

“Is it? Didn’t you catch just enough grief over it that you stopped writing along those lines?”

“No! I just…backed off a little.”

Arkasha shrugged and began to turn away.

“I want to talk about it,” Arkady protested. “I just don’t necessarily agree with you.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Arkasha sloshed the liquor around in his glass and took an experimental sip. “It’s gotten too warm, hasn’t it?” He got up without waiting for Arkady’s answer and deposited the beaker back in the lab’s sample refrigerator. It was a little alarming to think of what else was in there with it. But if it had come out of the Aurelias’ fridge, then Arkady supposed it had seen worse.

“Tell me,” Arkasha said when he returned to his perch. “Have you ever read the Bible?”

Arkady’s surprise and dismay must have shown in his face, because Arkasha laughed and quickly said, “Oh no. I’m not one of them. I was just thinking of the verses in Leviticus about the scapegoat.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not familiar with goats. What’s the Latin species name?”

Arkasha laughed. “It’s a metaphor, not a species. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the ancient Israelites used to put all the sins of the people on the head of a goat and cast it out into the desert. ‘ And the goat shall bear away all their iniquities to an uninhabited land.’”

“I’m afraid I don’t see your point,” Arkady said, all too aware of how pompous he sounded.

“Don’t you? Instead of the desert we have euth wards. And instead of Yom Kippur we have culling and critique sessions.”

“That’s ridiculous, Arkasha! Renorming centers are for rehabilitation, not punishment. And even the people who can’t be reintegrated into their home crèches can lead happy, productive lives from the wards.”

“Oh, yeah? Name one person who’s done it.”

“Rumi.”

“Rumi, indeed. I was wondering when we were going to get to him. Brilliant, isn’t it? Let one dead dissident become a famous poet and you can wave his poems in the face of all the live dissidents to prove that they’re imagining things. Of course Rumi had to kill himself before he could be rehabilitated. But we only want to remember the feel-good part of the story. ‘I’m the echo of your echo, the shadow of your shadow’s shadow,’” Arkasha quoted, twisting Rumi’s famous lines to extract a disconcerting new meaning from them. “‘ And let’s face it, brother, a man needs a shadow.’”

The poet’s words hung in the air between them, a ghostly reminder of the great man’s unrequited and ultimately fatal passion.

“It’s a love poem,” Arkady protested weakly, “not a political tract.”

“Is there a difference?”

Arkady felt hot and restless. He stood up, his back protesting its long stint on the hard lab stool; but there was nowhere else to go in the suddenly cramped space of the lab, so he sat back down again.

“If you want to talk about love,” Arkasha said, “let’s talk about the six percent rule. Or don’t you know what it is?”

Of course Arkady knew. Everyone knew. The six percent rule had dogged Syndicate genetic designers since the moment the first cohort reached sexual maturity. It turned out, after all the millennia of debate and argument and condemnation, that you could sociogenetically engineer humans for either heterosexuality or homosexuality. It was child’s play. An idiot could do it. Except that neither the most brilliant genetic engineering nor the most repressive social systems could do it to everybody.No matter how careful or ruthless you were, about six percent of the population broke the other way out of the starting gate. And the percentage was the same regardless of whether you were trying to promote God-given heterosexuality or laboratory-manufactured homosexuality.

“Well, what if the six percent rule is like your ants?” Arkasha went on. “What was it you said in your dissent paper? That following behaviors are only adaptive as long as Russell’s prerequisite for inductive reasoning applies: as long as future futures continue to resemble past futures. But dissent is the swarm’s way of keeping alternative solutions on hand: hedging its bets just in case future futures break the rules learned from past futures.”

“Okay,” Arkady admitted. “I guess I said that.”

“So generalize. What if there’s a dissent instinct in all social animals, humans as well as ants? What if dissent—deviance, abnormality, protest, whatever you want to call it when some people in a society refuse to follow the crowd—is really the species trying to maintain enough diversity, mental as well as physical, to deal with unexpected bumps in the road? Has it ever occurred to you that we might be normalizing ourselves onto a fitness peak we’re not going to be able to climb back down from if our future futures turn out to be too different from our past futures?”

“First of all,” Arkady said after a stunned pause, “my dissent paper didn’t even remotely say that.And, second, how can you possibly compare political dissent, which, yes, I admit there might be a place for, with…well, deviance?”

Arkasha jumped up off his lab bench and started straightening already obsessively straight papers. “I have to get back to work, Arkady. It’s been nice talking to you. Let’s do it again next week.”

“Arkasha!”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just…” He floundered, unable to bring himself to speak the unspeakable. “I want…”

Arkasha sighed. “What do you want from me, Arkady?”

“I want…I likeyou, dammit! As a person. We should be friends, but every time it seems like we’re about to be, you…Oh for God’s sake, will you put your stupid notes away and sit down?”

Arkasha sat down, drawing his feet onto the bottom rung of his lab stool and crossing his arms over his chest like a child who’d just been yelled at for fidgeting.

“I mean if I bore you or something, let me know,” Arkady went on.

“I can live with it.”

“You don’t bore me,” Arkasha whispered.

“And I don’t care about the sex either.” There, he’d said it. It couldn’t get worse than that, could it? He plunged on. “I mean, of course I care. But I don’t care if you’re—I don’t care what you are. And I’m not going to report you, or anything like that. Maybe that’s wrong, but…I’m just not, okay? So if that’s why you’re avoiding me, you can stop worrying about it.”

Arkasha blinked. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s okay with you if I’m a sexual deviant?”

“Yes.”

“Failure to report is a crime, Arkady. You could land yourself in a renorming center that way.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should care. You could get yourself into a lot of trouble if you talk like that to just anybody.”

“I’m not talking to just anybody. I’m talking to you.”

“Arkady—”

“I mean it. I don’t care. And you don’t have to explain yourself to me. It’s over. We never have to talk about it again.”

“Arkady!”

“What?”

“I’m not.”

Arkady frowned at him for a moment, not understanding.

“I’m not.”

“Oh.”

One corner of Arkasha’s mouth quirked upward. “You sound disappointed.”

“I, uh…feel really stupid.”

“You don’t look so clever either. No, no! I’m joking! Seriously, Arkady, why should you feel stupid? There’s nothing to feel stupid about.”

“Well, I mean, I just assumed. And I’m not one of those guys who thinks he’s so devastatingly attractive that anyone who doesn’t fall into bed with him has to be a pervert.”

“I didn’t think you were one of those guys. Though you arepretty devastatingly attractive.”

The room suddenly felt hot and very small. He looked up to find Arkasha watching him intently.

“But this is a really long assignment, Arkady. A long time to live in each other’s back pockets if things go badly.”

“I wouldn’t be…difficult.”

“I know you wouldn’t. You’re much too nice for that.”

“I love you.”

Arkasha shrank back into himself again. When he finally answered his voice was muffled and he wouldn’t meet Arkady’s eyes. “You only say that because you don’t know me,” he said. “When you know me better, you won’t say it anymore.”

“Am I interrupting something?” Bella asked coolly from the door.

Arkady jumped, dropping his glass, which shattered deafeningly. Razor-sharp splinters of glass scattered to the room’s four corners. The place reeked of guilt and alcohol.

“Have you seen my sib?” Bella asked, casting a suspicious eye around the lab as if the two of them might have secreted her missing crèchemate in a file drawer.

“Should we have?” Arkasha asked.

Bella ignored him. “Well?” she said, looking at Arkady as if he were the only person in the room.

“Uh…no. Sorry.”

“She saidshe was coming down here to have you run a sample from the seed bank.” Typically, she managed to make the statement sound like an accusation. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her these days. Her mind is on everything except her job.”

Which probably meant that her mind was on everything except her crèchemate, Arkady thought uncharitably.

Meanwhile, Bella was still ostentatiously ignoring Arkasha. Embarrassed, Arkady stood up and ushered her out into the corridor so that Arkasha could get back to work if he wanted to.

But apparently he didn’t want to. He padded across the lab to take in the conversation over Arkady’s shoulder. Bella muttered something huffy about people sticking their noses in where they didn’t have any business to be.

“Am I interrupting something?” Arkasha inquired sweetly.

Bella glared at him.

“Have you tried paging her?” Arkady asked.

“Of course I have!” Now, for the first time, and quite inexplicably, she seemed embarrassed herself. “She doesn’t answer.”

“Have you talked to the Ahmeds about it?”

“I’m not disloyal!”

Right. Not disloyal enough to lodge a formal complaint against her crèchemate. Just disloyal enough to talk her down with every other construct on board.

“Well, if she shows up, I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

And after a few more complaints and accusations, Bella finally took herself off.

“I loathe that woman,” Arkasha murmured, tracking her progress down the hab ring.

“You shouldn’t provoke her,” Arkady said. “She already hates you. And she’s the type who gets people put on euth wards.”

Arkasha stared down the corridor. He looked wounded and brittle and terribly in need of protection. “You think I don’t know that?”

“I wish…”

“You wish what?”

“I don’t know. Nothing.”

“Listen, Arkady. I really do have work I need to get done tonight. Is it going to hurt your feelings if I go do it?”

“Of course not,” Arkady lied.

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“Thanks, Arkady. And don’t leave the light on, okay? I don’t want to keep you up.”

“I’ll leave the light on.”

“You don’t have to leave the light on.”

“I want to.”

“You shouldn’t.”

Arkady forced a grin that didn’t come out nearly as shaky as he’d thought it would. “Are you going to argue with me about this all night, or are you going to go do your work?”

INFORMATION COSTS

Problems with only partial or limited information arise in many disciplines: in economics, computer science, physics, control theory, signal processing, prediction, decision theory, and artificial intelligence.…Two of the basic assumptions of information-based complexity are that information is partial and contaminated. There is one further assumption—information costs. THESE THREE ASSUMPTIONS ARE FUNDAMENTAL: INFORMATION IS PARTIAL, INFORMATION IS CONTAMINATED, AND INFORMATION COSTS.

—J. TRAUB (1988)

Its official name was the Institute for the Coordination of Intelligence and Special Tasks, but most Israelis called it the Institute, or, in Hebrew, the Mossad.And the inconspicuous, close-mouthed, suspiciously fit men and women who worked at the Institute called it simply the Office.

The first time Cohen had walked into the shabby lobby off King Saul Boulevard and ridden the clanking elevator to the eighth floor he’d been in the real Hyacinthe’s body. It had been a week after the fateful doctor’s visit—and a week before Hyacinthe had worked up the courage to tell his wife about the diagnosis. Hyacinthe Cohen (Hy, predictably, to his Israeli friends) had been a pigheadedly rational man. And yet he had felt in his gut, at some level below words, that the disease wouldn’t really be real until he told his wife about it. How strange, Cohen thought now…and how human. Almost as human as the feeling the memory aroused in Cohen: that only now, when it was far too late, was he finally beginning to understand the man.

Hyacinthe had leaned against this very same rail, looking at his reflection, still strong and wiry as a greyhound, and feeling the first subtle tremors of the disease that would finally kill him. Cohen hadn’t remembered that heartsick moment for two lifetimes as humans measured them. Now he asked himself how he could ever have forgotten it.

He glanced at Li, who had crossed her arms and thrown her head back to squint impatiently at the flickering lights of the number panel. She doesn’t understand,he thought on a confused rush of emotion that mingled frustration, fear, and anger. She hasn’t begun to know what death is.

“What’s wrong?” She was staring at him, faint wrinkles of worry framing the bridge of her nose.

“Just appalled by the disaster in the mirror. I look like an upper-class English twit on safari. No nice French boy should ever have to wear these shoes!”

“Better alive and frumpy than fashionably dead,” Li drawled.

Cohen sniffed theatrically. “The fact that you could say—no, even think such a thing makes me seriously doubt your moral fiber!”

When the doors finally opened onto the eighth floor, Cohen realized that he’d forgotten just how underwhelming the place was. Even on the eighth floor—perhaps especially on the eighth floor—Mossad headquarters had the peculiar official shabbiness of all Israeli government buildings. All the furniture was painted IDF olive drab, but somehow it still looked like it had been bought at five different yard sales. There was no reception area, just a narrow corridor that had been transformed into a makeshift security checkpoint by pushing two heavy desks together and depositing a muscular young katsa-in-training behind them on a sagging office chair that was probably older than he was.

The guard’s sidearm was holstered, but even with the elaborate security check they’d undergone before getting in the elevator he was on his feet and ready to draw before the elevator doors opened. This wasn’t a country, or a building, in which people took chances. Li and Cohen surrendered their left hands to the guard’s implant scanner, then sat down in the chairs he waved them to and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

They’d arrived for a meeting at four, and now they were watching the clock creep toward five. The usual tomblike quiet still reigned on the eighth floor, but behind their backs they could hear the cables of the ancient elevators groaning as the departing crowds of junior spooks and clerical employees made their daily getaway.

And all the while a niggling, annoying, self-indulgent little complaint rattled pointlessly around Cohen’s mind:

Gavi never made me wait this long.

Cohen’s relationship with the Mossad had begun humbly. A few lunchtime meetings during vacations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Keeping an ear open for useful information. Passing on the innuendoes and misinformation that the King Saul Boulevard spin doctors crafted to mislead Israel’s enemies. Making his well-secured homes available, no questions asked, to the suspiciously athletic young men and women who occasionally found reason to use them. Dropping a request for coveted information into the ear of a sympathetic UN official, and pointing out that a Jew could be loyal to his own government and still feel a moral obligation to pass along any news that would help more of the nice boys and girls serving on the Green Line go home to their parents on their own feet instead of in body bags. In short, he’d been the perfect sayan: a volunteer loyal to the country of his birth, but willing, within the bounds of that first loyalty, to do whatever little things he could to help Israel.

And of course little was a matter of perspective. Eighteen percent of the UN’s nonmilitary spinstream communications passed through Cohen’s networks or the networks of various former associated AIs. He’d written the software that handled pension administration for the civil services of half the Periphery.

All of UNSec’s feared semisentients had evolved more or less directly from Cohen’s own expert systems, and over the years he had quietly acquired controlling interests in the defense contractors who manufactured them. Very little happened in UN space that Cohen didn’t eventually find out about. And when he could—with discretion and never risking too much social and political capital on any one roll of the dice—he made sure that Israel’s interests were served.

Most of the time that was all he did. But once or twice a century he was asked to do more. And each time the Office called, he was brought up against the memory—a memory that made him the only living link to a past that was dead history to the rest of humanity—that Hyacinthe’s grandfather had gone into Dachau in 1943 and never come out.

And so, over time, Cohen had become something between a sayanand a katsa,a full-fledged Mossad agent. He’d gone through the katsainduction course five times, in five different bodies—ostensibly to refresh his tradecraft, but really to cement his relationships with successive generations of the Mossad’s human leadership. He’d worked for all the great ones: Gershon, Barzilai, Hamdani, and now the legendary Didi Halevy. He’d been burned, sometimes badly enough that even his supporters in the Security Council had shrugged and admitted his probable (though never quite provable) guilt. But Cohen was rich, very very rich. So they’d turned a blind eye and tolerated him.

Until Tel Aviv. In one bloody night Tel Aviv had killed half a dozen UNSec and Mossad agents, ended Gavi’s career, and stripped Cohen of his French passport and the last tatters of plausible deniability.

So why was he running to Didi’s aid again? And why on Earth was he dragging Li with him?

At the prospect of dragging Li into the wake of Tel Aviv, all the guilt and anxiety and self-loathing Cohen had been shoving under the rug for so long rose up to accuse him. And with them came a little shudder of apprehension that he would have called a ghost walking over his grave…if he weren’t himself the ghost of a man whose very grave no longer existed.

Did all spies feel this way? Did they all suffer from the gnawing suspicion that the safe everyday world was just the surface of a deep ocean, and that they would break through the fragile surface tension and drown if the bulkheads they constructed around their separate and conflicting lives were ever breached? At least human spies had the unity of their bodies to fall back on: one brain, one set of memories, and the ironclad physiological conviction that the chaos raging inside their skulls was unique and singular and meaningful. Cohen had nothing to hang his identity on but the spooky phenomenon of emergence. And how long could you survive out there in the lying cold when you were only a ghost to begin with?

At a quarter past five the door at the end of the hall opened and the man they were waiting for emerged.

“Cohen!” he cried. “Welcome home, my friend!” He looked back and forth between the two of them, his eyes bright behind Coke bottle glasses, his normally drawn face wrinkled with a scrappy little boy’s grin. “So which one of you is you?” he asked. “Who do I have the right to kiss, and who do I have to fob off with a handshake?”

Cohen stepped into the little man’s outstretched arms. “You’re perfectly welcome to kiss us both. But me first, please.”

Didi Halevy’s friends said he looked like an out-of-work undertaker. Didi Halevy’s enemies, if they were wise, didn’t say anything. Cohen had once spoken to a katsawho had worked the NorAmArc with Didi when they were both mere field agents. “He ought to be in the dictionary under the word nebbish,” the man had said admiringly. “When Didi walks into a room his own mother would swear someone just left!”

All of which drove home to Cohen just how unhuman he himself was. Because to Cohen, Didi had always seemed morereal than most people, not less. And though he and Didi saw each other at rare intervals, and usually only during moments of crisis, there were few things he enjoyed more than an hour spent talking to this extraordinary man who looked so inexplicably ordinary to his fellow humans. Or at least that had been how things stood before Tel Aviv.

“Can we take you to dinner when we’re done here?” Cohen asked Didi.

“No. But you can come to my house for dinner. My daughters are here on their Yom Kippur visas, and Zillah’s always delighted to see you. And of course”—with a polite nod to Li—“the invitation is also for…?”

“Actually, we’ve met,” Li said. “At the War College on Alba. You probably don’t remember, but I took a class the semester you visited.”

“Oh dear. I should remember, of course, but I meet so many people. And my memory for faces is very poor.”

Cohen rolled his eyes and coughed.

“I’m sorry,” Didi said humbly, “it’s dusty in here. All the paper, you know. You wouldn’t believe the problems we have with allergies. Would you like to borrow my eyedrops?”

Didi’s office was material proof of the old Mossad dictum: the smaller the office, the bigger the reputation. The place must have been a mop closet in some prior incarnation. Only the timeless tools of the trade—the glass-topped desk, the paper shredder, the scrambled landline, the dusty green ranks of locked file cabinets—suggested the secrets its walls had seen.

Nor did the room give anything away about Didi himself. There were no family pictures, no knickknacks, no mementos. The only hint of personality was a fading computer printout taped to the wall behind Didi’s head, where generations of young field agents had read it while listening to briefings, waiting for Didi to get off the phone with his wife or daughters, or yawning through administrative updates. The list, which Cohen happened to know had been a present from the last class of katsasDidi took through field training, contained five items:

1. The odds of an agent ending up in a hole in the ground are directly proportional to the number of people who know him from a hole in the ground.

2. The best thing to say is always nothing.

3. When you want to know what a piece of information means, look at where it’s been.

4. Small guns are more trouble than they’re worth.

5. Everyone has his dumb blonde and his rented Ferrari.

As they passed into the office, a slender young man appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to frisk them a second time. Cohen stood patiently to be searched, as did Li; but while Li’s inspection of the boy was limited to a quick glance at all the potential hiding places for concealed weapons, Cohen’s once-over was a bit more thorough.

The boy had the parchment skin and glossy curls of a yeshiva student. His glasses were cheap, like Didi’s, and the lenses were almost thick enough to obscure the long-lashed bedroom eyes behind them. Which didn’t change by one jot the fact that the body under the rumpled suit was a soldier’s body, and the sleepy-lidded eyes looked out at the world with the calculating poise of a professional killer.

Once he’d pronounced them clean, the young man escorted them into Didi’s inner sanctum and hesitated ostentatiously.

“Thank you, Arik,” Didi said. And waited.

The boy heaved a sigh of protest over the security breach and slipped out of the room, leaving the three of them alone together.

“Good youngsters coming in these days,” Didi told Cohen. “It’s a nice thing to see kids who take their work seriously.”

“Well, you do get the pick of them.”

“You want a boy like Arik should be rotting in a foxhole? Five languages he speaks. Arabic like a native.”

No doubt he did speak five languages. He also looked like a smaller, paler, less handsome, and decidedly less good-natured copy of Gavi Shehadeh. But Cohen knew better than to suggest that this might have anything to do with Didi’s obvious affection for the boy.

Didi chatted on, mentioning mutual friends. Cohen let the small talk flow over him without too much thought—something he’d long ago learned to do when humans started talking this way—and focused on the body language. He’d wondered for a long time what Catherine Li and Didi Halevy would make of each other. Now he watched each of them summing the other up and asked himself whether these two particular opposites were about to attract or repel.

Li, three years out of the Peacekeepers, still looked so ill at ease in mufti that even the most casual observers pegged her for an off-duty soldier. Didi, by contrast, had looked like a disheveled impostor the one time Cohen had seen him in uniform. In fact, one of the often-discussed mysteries of the Mossad chief’s legendary career was the question of how a man who seemed too fragile to lift a piece of paper had survived his compulsory military service long enough for his unique talents to be recognized.